Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

Angelopoulos might be timely. I can imagine he would've got some votes in the past. Akerman, Martel. & depending how recent we get, the sorta Eastern contingent of Bilge Ceylan, Puiu, Mungiu.

i didn't love Summer Hours a lot? but I'm slightly blank to Assayas and Ozon &c.

Much more of a Desplechin guy myself. Not that he'd show up on a hypothetical S&S ballot or anything.

who was the guy who made the weirdest list ever

It wasn't Sight and Sound, but in one of James Monaco's handbooks, he surveyed a bunch of writers on the best American film between '68 and '77 or thereabouts. I remember B. Ruby Rich co-compiled a list with somebody, and it had stuff like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Ganja and Hess (way pre-internet, i.e. at a time when those films weren't such a fact of life). Wish I could remember the whole list, it really jumped out from the others.

kiarostami is pretty sui generis, tsai is much more emblematic of the sort of asian "slow cinema" that (used to?) burn a lot of critics up.

tsai seems like a bit of a trend-chaser to me, actually, albeit an accomplished one. long takes? check. new extremity? check. etc.

Someone asked me recently who the best US directors of the last 25-30 years were, and I rather quickly answered Spielberg and Haynes. I suspect they are pigeonholed as too "popcorn" (still) and "academic," respectively, to pop up in many top 10s.

(likely more in this new media subset Eric refers to)

oh i think haynes will turn up

lots of critics still have bias against spielberg, i doubt that will change much this time out and even if it did, there isn't really a consensus favorite. e.t.? raiders? jaws? jurassic park? schindler's fucking list?

I'd say the critical cult around him has mostly centered on ET, Empire of the Sun, AI, and Munich. Maybe Close Encounters too, among the undying Paulettes.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-sight-and-sound-film-poll-jonathan-rosenbaum-on-satantango

Love watching J.Ro walk around and occasionally throw shade at the camera.

http://lumiere.net.nz/index.php/on-the-difficulty-of-film-canons/

Ignaty Vishnevetsky demonstrates his random method and how he ended up with three films from 1981: http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-sight-sound-film-poll-ignatiy-vishnevetsky-on-how-to-make-a-random-top-ten-list?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed

A nice defense of L'avventura (which I, for one, would love to see return to the top 10):

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/great-wide-open-l-avventura

(I mean, given it can't really be L'eclisse.)

i'd absolutely put it in my top 10

I doubt I would put any Antonioni in my top 100, even though I like four or five of his films very much. I felt guilty about this til I read how much Orson Welles disliked his portentousness.

there's this great welles interview where he admits he refuses to see any movie longer than 100 minutes.

that musta been pretty late, he claimed to love The Last Picture Show (118 m)

well, remember who was intellecutally fellating him in the early seventies

yes but.... he was a bit of a fibber, I've heard

Just because I love L'eclisse more than L'avventura now doesn't mean I'd exclude the latter from my top hundred.

ranked all-time lists are idiotic; there, I said it

Lock thread.

I just think film critics should aspire to being more than music critics who don't hear so well.

didn't know the S&S critics from '62 were music critics in cineaste clothing

i like ranked all-time lists.

I think you should let people play the games they want to play, Morbs.

knock yerself out

'62 critics had half as many films to deal with.

i like ranked all-time lists.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, 30 July 2012 20:36 (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which are your ten favourite

There's no way to stop it,
No, there's no way to stop it,
If the earth wants to roll around the sun.
You're a fool if you worry.
You're a fool if you worry,
Over anything but little number one.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/07/if-i-had-a-sight-sound-film-ballot/

are there any more Special Projects to come this summer, besides the one I'm 3 weeks late on? Possibly a "Call Me Maybe" lipsync?

I already said by email I would participate in 2022.

Pssssssh, My goal by 2022 is to have a real ballot.

wha, now that you've practically quit?

I've quit caring about the actual criticism. I haven't quit writing it.

< / sarcasm > < / obv >

which are your ten favourite

― , Blogger (schlump), Monday, July 30, 2012 7:58 PM (16 minutes ago)

i posted mine up-thread, probably wouldn't change it much now.

After Death (Bauer, 15)
The Scarlet Empress (Von Sternberg, 34)
L'eclisse (Antonioni, 61)
La Jetee (Marker, 62)
Simon of the Desert (Bunuel, 65)
Weekend (Godard, 67)
Pink Narcissus (Bidgood, 71)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 74)
Satantango (Tarr, 94)
Showgirls (Verhoeven, 95)
― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Wednesday, May 2, 2012 6:21 AM (2 months ago)

Six of these ended up on my "if I had a ballot" ballot for House, without having even double-checked here first.

Expect the silent era to fade out of all such polls w/in 20 years.

(Even faster than cinema will.)

LOL, faster than cinema will fade out of movie polls? Pretty Armond, even for you.

no, out of life

Not as long as there are polls to keep approximately 250 movies from the entirety of movie history alive.

what is ur favourite movie Shawshank or Avatar

ha i meant your fav lists
xp @ JD

haha! i like whichever greil marcus list it was where he listed 'germfree adolescents' as the greatest album of all time.

in the last joan didion book a quotation was opened by a wrong-facing pair of inverted commas. a joan didion book.

wait wrong thread

but surely part of a similar decline in critical thought

haha! i like whichever greil marcus list it was where he listed 'germfree adolescents' as the greatest album of all time

Second Gambaccini Top 100 albums book...sorry; back to Sight & Sound.

i only have the first of those books! could you post marcus's list, clemenza?

if i recall GM's list from the first book -- from 1977, i think -- was pretty unsurprising, with 'let it bleed' at the top and 'more chuck berry' somewhere in there. ('more chuck berry,' a long-forgotten collection, wound up in a surprising number of lists.)